An additional distinction was prewar versus postwar buildings. Sure, I thought, it would be nice to live in a beautiful old building with beautiful original details, built by an architect of note, storied and historic. But I wasn’t going to make a federal case out of it. Now came another essential distinction, one that largely broke down along the prewar/postwar distinction: co-op versus condo. Living in a house downtown, I was untutored regarding this particular binary opposition, one of the fundamental distinctions that organizes Manhattan buildings and Upper East Side identity.
In a co-op, Inga and my husband explained, board members decide who gets to live there and who doesn’t, and what the rules are. Some of the rules are straightforward and logical. For example, “summer rules” ensure that apartment renovations take place only in summer, when it’s easier to escape the noise by going outside or even to your country place for the whole summer. We live right on top of each other and under each other in Manhattan, so construction can wreck your quality of life. Summer rules are “very Upper East Side,” Inga informed me; almost no Upper West Side co-ops have them. And they make sense.
Other co-op rules are more arbitrary, more cultural than functional. For example, in a co-op you can’t just sublease your apartment or let your twentysomething move in. The board has to approve such things. And a particular building’s co-op may require that an applicant document astronomical liquid assets. Or not. They “require” this (when they choose not to overlook the requirement) as a kind of “insurance,” in spite of the fact that they essentially have a lien against every apartment in the building. That’s because in a co-op nobody owns an actual apartment. He or she owns “shares”—a bigger apartment generally means more shares. Shares are power. People who want to buy a co-op apartment almost always have to be interviewed by the board. And at a board interview, my husband and Inga warned me, the board members could ask you anything at all. Or decide not to let you move in for any reason at all. So that’s why the rare apartments in co-op buildings on Park and Fifth we looked at that advertised “No board approval” were mobbed, I realized, wondering whether owning shares in a co-op felt like having a housekeeper and a child in private school.
Condos are a little more expensive, I learned, generally allow more financing, and you really own them. They are also a little more free-and-easy. You can sublet your place, or use it as a pied à terre, if you choose. And in a condo, a management company scrutinizes your application, which feels less personal and invasive, somehow, than a bunch of your possibly future neighbors poring over every detail of your financial and personal life.
Whether it was a co-op or a condo, prewar or postwar, I considered as I made my way from the West Village to the Upper East Side daily, it was time to settle on a place. The cab fare was killing me. We had to move uptown so I could stop getting there every day.
And then one day, I found a place I thought would do. It was a modern building on Park Avenue, not a “prestigious” prewar building by a famous architect. I didn’t care—after all, it was less than two blocks from Central Park. The apartment itself initially seemed a little dark. But that was just the paint and I could “see through it.” The kitchen was “top-of-the-line,” as brokers say, if on the small side. There were “open city views,” meaning there was no view of the park, but there were no buildings right in front of your window, either; they were all a good distance off, giving you plenty of light and a pleasant feeling of space and company at the same time. It had the right number of bedrooms, one of them with a cute little table and chairs and an arts-and-crafts project in progress—buttons and pieces of dried macaroni and glitter on pink construction paper. This little girl’s room could easily be my little boy’s room, I realized, taking it in. The warm feeling of the kid-friendly mise-en-scène overrode my dislike of the lowish ceilings, busy street-corner location, and less-than-ideal layout.
I walked through the place a second time and a third, my excitement growing. “The broker couldn’t be here,” Inga explained—I knew it was a diss of some sort in the world of brokers and buyers and sellers, a communication that Inga and I didn’t merit her time, she was busy elsewhere or something—but I didn’t care. A second visit was arranged with all possible haste, so the broker—harried, indifferent, unfriendly—could meet and approve of me. Once she had, we scheduled yet another viewing, this time with my husband in tow.
My first clue that the owner was home, as we opened the door for our couple’s “viewing,” was the sound of her admonishing her daughter. Peering down the hall, I could see she was blond, like me, and about my age and build. She was saying, “Leda, if you’re eating, offer some to the other people in the room first!” Apparently she was referring to her broker, a large woman with short reddish hair whom I had met briefly on my previous visit, and who now stood between us and the family like a Jean Schlumberger–accessorized pit bull. Rings and bracelets flashing, she literally tried to block me as I walked toward the owner, who had her hand extended and gave me a friendly smile, to introduce myself. “I’m Allie,” she said, sounding harried and polite at once, a cadence and way of being that was becoming familiar to me as I met Upper East Side women on the street and in their apartments. Apparently it was important to Allie to set her eyes on the person or persons who proposed to buy the space she was trying to sell, and I was glad I had dressed nicely, relatively speaking. Her outfit was beautifully chic—fitted black capri pants, a snug lavender blouse, and a perfect, glossy light pink pedicure on her bare feet. From the looks of it, she had a hair and makeup artist. And this was just a Wednesday afternoon. “This is Sharon,” Allie told me, and the broker took my hand limply, looking past me. “Hello. We meet again,” I offered in a voice I hoped was pleasant.
It wasn’t the first time I had seen a broker be overtly and theatrically protective of her clients and strangely hostile toward a potential buyer. Sellers’ brokers were the self-appointed guardians of the families in transition, I had come to understand, their guides through a liminal state as they segued from owners to sellers to buyers to owners again themselves. Brokers wanted to be in on all points of these big transitions because they were also big transactions, with large commissions hanging in the balance. They were petrified of anything messing up a deal in the works, including contact between an owner and a potential buyer. And of being cut out. But there was something else, too, something stranger about brokers and clients on the Upper East Side, and I saw it now, as Allie told me she had to go check on her daughter, who had wandered down to her bedroom. I turned to Sharon and, just to be polite, asked her little Leda’s age.
“She’s three, and she goes to Temple Emanu-El Nursery School,” she responded shortly, and as haughtily as if she were reporting that she herself had just won a Nobel Peace Prize. I had noticed the tendency of brokers, architects, and nannies on the Upper East Side to act as though their status and that of their clients or bosses were one and the same—here it was again. When I asked if Temple Emanu-El was nearby, giving clue to the fact that I didn’t know anything about it, Sharon gaped at me in disbelief. I smiled, hoping to soften the blow of my obvious ignorance and indifference. But internally I was rolling my eyes and thinking, C’mon, lady. This isn’t your house. Or your family. She wanted the commission, no doubt, but she likely had several other interested parties lined up to buy the place. Sharon was a rich lady, like so many Upper East Side brokers. Her commission on every sale was 6 percent, and her personal take was 3 percent. In the midst of an economic and real estate boom, I was nothing to her, and it showed. I disliked her. We just stood there.
Thankfully, Allie soon returned, offering apologies and a sparkling water. We talked about our children—her daughter was a bit older than my son—as she walked me around the apartment, chatting about what she liked and what she didn’t with a straightforwardness I found winning. Sharon had fallen back behind us. She was no match for mommy talk. Inga, who told us my husband had called to say he was held up in traffic, had known to hang
back all the while and now made parallel chitchat with her colleague, who, I thought with a bizarre flash of pride, could never hope to be in her league. Inga was the better broker in every way—poised, socially and professionally skilled, beautiful. Ha!
“The people who work in the building are okay,” Allie told me as she led me down the hallway toward the master bedroom, “not great, but okay.” She explained that they were staying in the building but moving up to the penthouse, which had one more bedroom than this one did, and park views. I felt a little jolt of embarrassment—she was moving into a better place, and we were moving into her castoff—and then I pushed it away. Who cared? I surmised she was pregnant when she told me the plan, but didn’t ask. Instead I murmured something about how I’d just be relieved to have a lobby and an elevator—life in a town house, all those stairs and so on, was not easy with a little one and a stroller. She lit up. “You live in a town house? That’s my dream!” she pronounced emphatically. Somehow, I felt I had now righted myself from the injury of moving into her discarded husk of a house, like a needy hermit crab. Here we reached the bedroom and she began opening cupboards and closets, narrating them to me. These cubbies were for purses—I saw flashes of Gucci and Louis Vuitton and Goyard—and here were the shoe shelves, row after row of them.
“Do you want to keep the safe?” she asked me, leaning down to show me how it worked. I paused. What would I put in a safe? I wondered. I wasn’t much of a jewelry person. On our first vacation together, my husband had wanted to buy me some jewelry and I told him, “Thanks, but I don’t really like . . . gems.” It was true. He had to talk me into even a relatively modest diamond engagement ring, which initially struck me as an odd and entirely unsubtle and distasteful semaphore: I am someone else’s property. Eventually I capitulated because it was just easier that way and because it gave me a certain sense of security to be part of the tribe. And because, well, it was pretty.
“Sure.” I fumbled now, somehow not wanting to let on to Allie that I wasn’t like her in this or any other regard, and she quickly explained, “It’s good for the basics. Your big stuff you can have stored at the private bank on the corner; that’s what I do.” I took in the stilettos and the carefully folded cashmere sweaters arranged by color as she went on.
“I had the closet customized but I made some mistakes,” she summarized, standing up again. “I can show you how I’d do it again if you want, so it’s more efficient.” Here she sighed and apologized for the “mess,” though I couldn’t see one. In fact, it was something all the women I met on the Upper East Side always did—apologize for a mess that wasn’t there. Note to self: figure that one out.
Allie was smiling and extending her hand again. “Well, I’m really glad I got to meet you.” She explained that she had to run out with Leda and was sorry not to be able to meet my husband just then. “But I hope it all works out,” she pronounced meaningfully. “And . . . I’ll look for you in Palm Beach. You’re going, right? We’ll be at The Breakers.”
I was confused. “Um . . .” I cast my eyes about the room, letting them rest on the blue toile wallpaper as if it might hold some type of explanation. “We’re going . . . but not until May,” I said finally, recalling on the spot that in the late spring we were going to a conference my husband had there, wondering how on earth she knew about it.
She looked a little taken aback. “Oh, well . . . I guess it’s . . . I guess it’s still nice there then,” she faltered. Now she tilted her head and nodded and said, “Aspen, then!”
She said it so confidently, as if everybody saw everybody in Aspen, that I thought for a brief moment that she knew something I didn’t know about my travel plans, and we were in fact going. But of course I hadn’t skied in years and told her that no, we’d be having Christmas in New York. Her eyes widened. “Oh right,” she said, “getting ready for the move and everything, I guess?” I nodded and smiled, as if to leave open the possibility that, yes, next year we’d be right back to Palm Beach for Thanksgiving and Aspen for winter break. Definitely.
Apparently I had confused her as much as she had confused me. Clearly, I had to get a grip on the migration patterns of the Upper East Side. I was a bird of a different feather.
The apartment we hoped to buy was one of the only condos on Park Avenue, making it particularly desirable for people who didn’t want to have to deal with a co-op and all its rules and regulations and restrictions, or who feared they wouldn’t measure up. And for people who really cared about a Park Avenue address. And so here was the rub—the building was actually a “condop,” a hybrid beast that was technically a condo but “acts like a co-op.” Oh Lord, I thought when Inga delivered the news. There’s a word for that?
Whatever it was, the application was long and detailed, demanding we disclose everything from our credit-card numbers and college GPAs to every school we, our parents, and our children had ever attended. “Why don’t they just ask us how often we have sex?” I nearly wailed to my husband as we talked it over. A circumspect Midwesterner in my heart, I was outraged and deeply offended by the idea of all this poking and prodding from total strangers.
I was coming to understand that the “purchase application process” was one of the most humiliating hazing rites imaginable, after which, everyone said, you could not shake the feeling that a lot of people you don’t know well know way too much about you. Because they do. And that, I realized, as we contemplated our next move and our application, is one of the ways hierarchies are established and maintained in Manhattan, where buildings comprise unrelated strangers living in close physical proximity and a fragile but utterly imperative mutual dependency prevails. We engineer relationships and a sense of obligation to do right by exchanging information, just as women gossiping over fences or sitting next to each other washing clothes on river rocks do.
Of course, the exchange is unequal. As supplicants (I preferred the term to applicants because it felt more honest) abasing ourselves for access, we were at a disadvantage, and at the mercy of our potential neighbors. By showing our carotid artery, or our belly, as dogs do when they lie on their backs in a fight, we demonstrated a willingness to submit, to cede power, to make ourselves utterly vulnerable. As with punishing hazing rituals and rites of passage the world over, we would emerge on the other side utterly exhausted and spent, with a newly minted identity: residents of XYZ Park Avenue. Or so we hoped.
I was in the very early stages of a complicated pregnancy and on mandated bed rest when it was time to do our board interview. No problem, the board representatives said—they would come to us. And they did. There we were, just us and seven total strangers. In our bedroom. I wore pearls and a jacket on top and pajama bottoms under the covers. We served cheese and crackers and wine. They had to stand up. They commented awkwardly on our book collection and asked about our son and whether we had plans to renovate.
It seemed our answers and application were good enough. We moved into our new home on Park Avenue at the very height of the economic boom, a moment when incomes, investment portfolios, and egos were surging all over the city, and nowhere more so than in our newly adopted, elite zip code. If we thought we were done, that after having completed this particular bruising and humiliating rite of passage we were home free, or even home, and that we could finally let our guard down a little and just relax, we were wrong.
Oh my God, I realized one afternoon with a start as my toddler and I sat on the new sofa in our new living room reading a story about a teacher and her students on a magic school bus. I totally forgot to apply to nursery school.
CHAPTER TWO
Playdate Pariah
GEOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, the Upper East Side is only a few miles from the West Village. We had merely moved from one corner of town to another, which sounds like no big deal. But in social and emotional and cultural terms, it was another world. There were changes big and small, such as getting our son accustomed to his new bed and the noise the bathtub made. And then there was the process of a
cclimating, all of us, to our new neighborhood. The whole place felt starchier and more formal than I had imagined it would. On my first runs to the corner for groceries, I felt terribly underdressed in my jeans and clogs; the women around me were decked out, dressed and groomed to the max even at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday. Everything about them—their demure, costly looking boots and cashmere pea coats with gleaming buttons, their shiny blowouts and gorgeous bags—looked lavishly expensive and meticulously tended to. All the world was a stage in our new ecological niche, it seemed, each day an opportunity for a fabulous, carefully curated change of wardrobe, as well as painstaking attention to hair and makeup.
The inside of our new building was not any more relaxed or casual. Or friendly. Just as we moved in, a debate was raging among residents over whether people with babies and toddlers in strollers should be required to take the service elevator, normally used for ferrying deliveries and garbage. The passenger elevators, some of our neighbors apparently believed, should be reserved for everyone except children, including dogs. These were dressed in cashmere and leather finery, accessorized with bejeweled leashes clutched in the hands of decidedly ungrandmotherly dowagers sporting massive diamonds. “Is that thing real?” I whispered to the elevator attendant after a soignée older woman wearing the biggest bauble I’d ever seen stepped off one afternoon. “I think so,” he whispered back, eyebrows raised in astonishment. “She has a few of them, actually.”
Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir Page 4